Paris was already cooking when Jonathan Anderson called his guests to the Musée Nissim de Camondo at nine in the morning. Dior handed out cold towels, parasols and strawberries at the door, then sent tuxedos into the daylight.
The Summer 2027 show had been booked for half past two in the afternoon. The heatwave sitting on the city made that hour impossible, so Dior moved the whole production to breakfast time and staged it through the mansion and its garden off the Parc Monceau. The house that Moïse de Camondo built before the First World War is partway through a restoration, a building between two versions of itself. Anderson, one year into his tenure and showing his second men's collection, clearly enjoyed the company.
The soundtrack came from Fred Again, cut for the occasion. The British producer works by sampling, lifting a familiar fragment and setting it somewhere it has never been. Anderson built the collection the same way. Silhouettes from the Dior archive surfaced in the wrong fabrics, at the wrong hours, in the wrong century, and looked better for the dislocation.
After dark
The clothes were dressed for a party the morning light had interrupted. Sunglasses arrived paved in rhinestones. Trousers came sequinned to the ankle, above boots mirrored like disco balls. A tuxedo drifted out loose and deconstructed, its formality slept in. Metallic threads lit a palette that otherwise kept its voice down. Evening wear has hovered at the edge of Anderson's Dior; here it moved to the centre of the frame.
The softer notes were botanical. Flowers sat in buttonholes, and a pair of boots carried small embroidered ladybirds, details pitched at whoever gets close enough to notice.
Anderson treats the Dior archive like a record crate, and he knows which groove to lift.
The Splendid EditThe remix
The tailoring played tricks with distance. Pinstripes and houndstooth were printed onto silk chiffon rather than woven, so the suits read as City propriety from across the garden and dissolved into transparency at arm's length. The jackets were left unlined, a practical mercy in the weather. A sequined coat performed the same illusion in reverse, its paillettes resolving into black and white polka dots from the far side of the parterre.
Denim carried the workroom's heaviest lifting. Japanese denim shirts were patchworked and re-stitched seam by seam. Ripped jeans were threaded with fine silver chains. Jackets stretched downward into fringe, unravelling on purpose. The house cannage, off duty from its handbags, turned up quilted into a soft denim tote.
Courtesy of Dior — Dior Summer 2027, Paris
Past, printed
The archive work went deep rather than wide. A trompe-l'œil scarf was embroidered flat onto a silk shirt, reproducing a motif from the 1979 haute couture. A coat carried embroidered scrolls borrowed from an eighteenth-century original, at ease in a house built to look a century older than it is. The references landed lightly; nothing in the garden felt like homework.
Anderson's first Dior season asked what the house could carry. This one asked what it could dance in. By ten the models had gone back inside, the guests had surrendered their parasols, and the heat took the garden back.
The Splendid Edit on the Dior Summer 2027 men's show at the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris. Details from Dior and LVMH.
Photography courtesy of Dior — Summer 2027, Paris